Introduction
The Visual Narrative Unit has been a large majority of the second semester so far, and even goes back to the drafting of many of my films and stories from the first semester. We have spent a long time crafting stories and characters, which I think has really helped bring my stories to life. I also have gained some very valuable skills from all three of my classes including the use of vivid imagery from english, the ability to ransform my story through design in Digital Media, and creating a whole scene and world through Film.
Story
In English class, we were tasked with creating a short story, based off of a character that we created. We studied various stories written by authors such as My House by George Saunders to study the complex characters and their traits that make them so interesting. This helped me establish my character and story, based out of a medieval time period, where a family with a vast amount of wealth and estate has internal problems. The protagonist, Jacques struggles with a secret that he has held for majority of his life, and he has become tortured by the idea of not being able to share it any longer. After finishing the story, I went back into the Isolation Booth to create a audiobook of it, that has sound effects and music to match the story. Something I valued from being able to see how audiobooks are really made, is that now I can create a podcast or some sort of story that is not just written down and rehearsed.
Something else that I do not have the screenshot of is the creation of the Album Cover, which was done in Adobe Illustrator, after learning how to utilize it in digital media.
Illustrations
The Illustrations done is Digital Media have been varied from practice with MR. Flo, to creating our own projects that can be used to be put on clothing, or other objects.
Short Story
Seen above was the short story that we created in English class, and the audiobook that we completed in Digital Media. After we finished the short story Audio Book, we were tasked with creating a Album cover for it, which is where I created the photo of a castle described in the introduction, combined with the gassy lands in backgrounds and banners, that represented the medieval feel.
Exquisite Corpse
The Exquisite Corpse project was a group project, where three students were tasked with creating our own image independently of one another without knowing anything about the others. The only guide lines we had were little tick marks in between each image to help make the three images flow. In this image, on the left side was James’s piece of art, with mine in the middle which I was trying to make something tat was universal. I ended up going with wires for my inspiration, which I think ended up working out, and then Brad on the right side.
Illustrator Project
For the illustrator project, we were given complete freedom to design whatever we want to put on many different articles of clothing and objects. After a lot of through I created two pieces of artwork. The first, I put on a sweatshirt, that represented the Guide Dogs For The Blind Organization, with a dog customized logo on the back, and the second, I started to recreate the warriors logo with the bridge and basketball included. I didn’t end up doing anything with it, but I still was excited by creating it.
Music Production
Parody Project
The Parody Project was a partner project with Brad, where we recreated Element by Pop smoke to fit Freestyle and out experience so far. We used a backtrack for the background and sang the rest of our lyrics which we created. We used adobe Audition to create the sound effects, and produce the music. We also were able to us the recording studio which was a very cool experience, with the use of of extremely high quality instruments and microphones.
Film
For the second half of the first semester and majority of the second, we were busy crafting our narrative films, through pre-production where we crafted stories and story boarded, which involved writing out each scene on each card. We had extensive planning periods to hammer out our final stories. We then moved into production where we got actors and started filming our dailies and putting our scenes into real life. We had numerous rounds of dailies, and then enter post production, where all of the editing, putting scenes together, color correction, music and audio were entered. Overall this was the majority of the film class assignment, and while this took up most of our time, we had a couple smaller assignments that are presented down below.
Griffiths Pattern
This is our Griffiths pattern assignment where we were challenged to follow a pattern of film. Establishing a scene, and building characters through close, medium, and wide shots, along with everything in between. I worked on this with Brad and Jehannah, where we were able to form a piece about to characters emotions and two different experiences.
Suspense Scene
Narrative
Synopsis
The initial idea that we had is that there is somebody who is very addicted to their phones and
social media, and everything that is online, and he does not really live life in the moment, but
rather focuses on his appearance and his popularity, all from his online platforms. He can either
be very popular or not popular at all (TBD) but we are going to start with act 1 showing that he is
a pretty normal teen who goes to school, and shows up to activities, but every moment he can
get he is on the phone, being not that social. Then we are going to cut to him having very small
interactions with his family, distracted by his phone, even while doing certain things like driving
or eating dinner. He will be yelled at and reprimanded by his parents and siblings for not paying
attention, but will just ignore them, as he is in his own world. He will then stay up late on his
phone looking at whatever. He won’t get any exercise, and his life is just draining away. Until he
is going to sleep really late, and his eyes are extremely red from looking at the screen 24/7.
Even while watching TV he is doing other things on his phone, and he shows that he has a
really short attention span. Then he is going to wake up the next day, and phones are not going
to exist, and they never will exist. He will become super confused and will become very
saddened because he wont have it, and he will have to adjust to the world where phones do not
exist. At this point there are two options. We can either show his life would have become if there
were no phones, sort of like a way to show towards the future, or another option is for him to live
his life without his phone, for a whole day, and then when he falls back to sleep, he returns to
the world with his phone, but it is very different because he was seen what actually paying
attention and being social looks like. He will then see what people like him actually look like after
unplugging and this will make him want to change his life course, by becoming super in tune
with nature and everything that is going on around him. Some seeds that he could plant could
be about places that he visits after the transformations, and noticing the beauty in the trees, and
nature around him that he never really noticed before. He also would actually talk to people and
he could form a valuable relationship with his family who he actually pays attention to for now
on
This was our original Narrative synopsis that me and my partner Brad made, in order to formulate our first narrative structure and pitch. After discussions with the class and Mr. Taylor, we ended up making certain major changes including, changing the setting from the school feel to the home, and then changing the story from him and his classmates to him and his relationship to his sister. We then went on to make story boards where Brad and I drew pictures of each shot and each scene on little post it cards, which we then presented to Mr. Taylor who made us revise it, which took a lot of time. We eventually finished with a story board that is pretty similar to what is actually in the film.
This was our short trailer that we were tasked to make to show at the Freestyle exhibition. I struggled initially to figure out how I would incorporate everything and in the end, I think the results were alright, but given more time and energy, could have been made better.
This is our final Narrative project that we spent majority on and this is the final results…